


softly, gently

by islet



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Asphyxiation, M/M, Mind Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-31
Updated: 2019-07-31
Packaged: 2020-07-28 03:38:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20057401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/islet/pseuds/islet
Summary: They don't have sex in a carnal sense.





	softly, gently

**Author's Note:**

> Title borrowed from a lovely little piano piece by Jon E. Amber.

Every day, the World grew a little hotter.

There was no dignity in it - the sweat that beaded down their foreheads, the sticky hands that smeared and stuttered against skin, the feeling of asphyxiation without the release of death.

It wasn’t sex in a carnal sense; it never had been, and never would be. There was no real reason why it wouldn’t be. They had certainly accumulated a collection of sins in their six thousand years. 

Nevertheless, it wasn’t.

Human bodies were made to suffer the pleasures of sinning - this was another of God’s great jokes, second only to the dinosaurs. Some might even have called it cruel. How was one meant to do any good at all, when doing exactly the opposite felt so good?

Still, they weren’t human.

Still, they had learned to suffer the pleasures.

A bite of cake or two hundred. A century of sleep. A vast collection of First Editions. An apartment full of terrified houseplants. Undeserving commendations tucked away in a drawer. In the gentlemen’s club, a possessive hand settled on a thigh softened by years and years of hundreds and hundreds of bites of cake.

Everybody’s a sinner.

* * *

The Start had been forgotten, lost to time as so many beginnings are destined to be. Educated guesses put it in the time of the French Revolution, but there was no way to be sure.

It wasn’t the sort of thing that happened of its own accord, but it was the sort of thing that happened while you weren’t paying attention.

After it had begun, morning broke upon all the sinners in the city and found its way, like a persistent fruit fly, into their room through the cracks in the shutters.

There were too many feathers on the bed, catching on the silk sheets, a dizzying mosaic of black and white. Nobody noticed.

He was pinned to the bed, completely broken, completely ravished, completely lost, completely mad. The last of his defences had dissolved with the wine, like smoke in the water. Somebody was telling him things, voiceless, radiant and seeping into every crack in his damned soul.

They had just discovered this, although they would not remember discovering it in the years to come. It had started with too much wine, beading richly against the glass like blood, and then it had continued. You could drink yourself to death. They did. At the brink of death, the flames of mortality extinguishing, their eyes had locked too readily.

It was like a train pulling into the very last station - shuddering, steaming, spent.

And then he had entered.

The cracks had called out to him like veins in marble, dark and inviting.

He went.

Filth poured out of him like water, barely comprehensible despite years of cogitation.

_ Mine mine mine mine, _ like a call to worship. _ Want to feel you, want to touch you, want to swallow you whole. Want you to beg me, want you inside me, now, please, _ I’ll _ beg _ -

And then there were images. Like dreams, inked delicately into the back of their eyelids, unwavering, relentless. Selfish _ desire _. Waves of pleasure crashing onto shore, their mortal forms shuddering with the intensity of it.

To know a sin, to pursue it, to reap the reward. 

Something pulled him in deeper, clutching to his words with a familiar desperation, and then there was Warmth.

Hell was Cold. Another one of God’s great jokes. The fires in Hell flickered meaninglessly, unsatisfying to every degree. He had not felt warmth since the gates of Eden had closed to him, unforgiving.

And yet here it was, finding its way into places that he had never known were empty.

He was on the bed now, held in place by nothing but sheer will. Sweat slicked the sheets, knuckles white, tight. The heat was spreading across his body, the body he couldn’t find. Warmth rolled its way down his soul like a wagon down a hill.

Liberation, an angel’s undivided devotion, love, absolution.

Completion.

Later, some of the townsfolk thought it was strange that morning had come so soon that day, barely hours into the night, but mostly, nobody noticed.

* * *

It wasn’t a secret, except it was.

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

On this day, just one, and the demon will push him off the cliff, watch him tumble, threads to mortal existence snapping as he careens towards Death, towards the Abyss, and then the demon will enter him. 

The cracks had become roads. Perhaps they led to something.

Nothing, truly, is ever only One Thing. Not Hell, not Heaven, not angels, not demons.

This felt like completion, the return of a man to his lover, the return of a man to his Creator.

There aren’t _ really _any angels on the head of a pin. There aren’t any demons either. It’s all a metaphor. On this day it was a metaphor for dying.

The hand on his throat closed. The air in his lungs found another way out. His vessels pulsed uselessly below the point of compression. His hand tightened, too. The room spun, blurry, lights pricking through the grey.

At the brink of death, certain things become possible.

The roads were inviting. He pursued them on a chariot of filth, spreading pulses of a sinner’s short-lived ecstasy like a king throwing coins at his people.

His body choked, each cell crying out for air, desperate, begging.

And then the familiar warmth exploded inside him, flowing into all the familiar places. _ Good boy, you’re such a good boy, my _ dear _ , you’re doing so well - _

Absolution.

Completion.

* * *

Every day, the World grew a little hotter.

**Author's Note:**

> Aziraphale and Crowley have mind sex that involves some asphyxiation. It's kind of philosophical, but in a Thought Catalogue kind of way.


End file.
